Blair: Religion must be saved from extremism

Tony Blair visits a City Academy school school in London today. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/Reuters

Religion must be rescued from extremism and irrelevance, the former prime minister Tony Blair said tonight when he made his first major speech in Britain since stepping down last year.

Blair - a Catholic convert – made the remarks during a lecture on faith and globalisation at Westminster cathedral, where he attended Mass while he was still in office.

He used the 45-minute speech to highlight the work of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which has its official launch next month.

The organisation will concentrate on helping different faith groups to work together and will produce material on the world's different religions.

"For religion to be a force for good, it must be rescued not simply from extremism - faith as a means of exclusion - but also from irrelevance [as] an interesting part of our history but not of our future," he said.

The former prime minister also warned that too many people saw religious faith as stark dogmatism and empty ritual.

"Faith is reduced to a system of strange convictions and actions that, to some, can appear far removed from the necessities and anxieties of ordinary life," he said.

"It is this face that gives militant secularism an easy target. It mocks certain of the practices and traditions of organised religion which they define as 'faith'. 'Faith' is to be found in the cassocks and the gowns and the rituals."

He argued that faith could help advance humanity and end global poverty.

One of the foundation's aims is to bring people of faith together to deliver the UN's Millennium Development Goals, which include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

The speech was his first and most detailed public statement on religion, a subject his most senior advisers told him to avoid during his decade-long premiership.

Alastair Campbell, his director of strategy and communications, once famously intervened to prevent the prime minister from answering a question about his faith, saying: "We don't do God."

In his speech, Blair said that there are several reasons why politicians sidestep questions on faith, supporting Campbell's policy.

"You may be considered weird. Normal people aren't supposed to 'do God'," he said. "There is an assumption that, before you take a decision you engage in some slightly cultish interaction with your religion.

"Third, you want to impose your religion on others. Fourth, you are pretending to be better than the next person. And finally, and worst of all, that you are somehow messianically trying to co-opt God to bestow a divine legitimacy on your politics."

Blair has carved out a lucrative career in public speaking. Earlier this year, he earned £300,000 for a speech to bankers Goldman Sachs in Florida, and he last year earned £240,000 in southern China.

His commitment to religion and interfaith work is such that he was not paid for today's speech, and will not be paid for any of the work he will do for the foundation.

His lecture is one of six in a series called Faith and Life in Britain series, organised by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the most senior Catholic in England and Wales.

Other speakers will include William Hague MP, Rabbi Julia Neuberger and the Archbishop of Canterbury.